Image by Umair Ghani
Ashoak Upadhyay
A
t the outset we shall say it: Intizar Husain, born in undivided India on 21 December 1925, who died in Pakistan on 2 February 2016 wrote fiction and prose that can be termed ‘classic’ works. We will say this by resorting to one of talo Calvino’s criteria of classic books: “A classic book is one that has never finished saying what it has to say.” One can read Husain’s work this way; the verb “read” is used deliberately instead of “re-reead” because to delve into his fiction is to read every time, with new eyes, to realize that our world has entered an apocalypse of frightening proportions as the cults of violence and greed have spread so rapidly and heedlessly as to engulf not just ‘Other’ communities but all life in their murderous onslaught. When you read Husain’s stories with the eyes full of the horror of anthropocentric violations of all forms of life, the earth, water and now perhaps even space, you can feel the wisdom of his vision and perhaps even nod at his statement to literary critic and translator Alok Bhalla who had met him in Lahore in 1992,”No light of hope or peace shines through my stories..”
You shake your head and want to move on to 2 minute-reads or re-reads more pleasant perhaps. Who needs stories without hope, right? Isn’t life hard enough? But stay with him a little longer. Read carefully the stories curated by Alok Bhalla for this issue of The Beacon in his translation from the author’s Urdu originals and you will find grace and beauty even in the sorrows and uncertainties that inflect his protagonists. For Intizar Husain was profoundly visionary; his dreams perhaps faintly, glimmer through his dark fiction; listen to the gurgling of the subterranean rivers of hope for a better life of grace and ‘good.’ Not the hope driven by the telos of Progress and Utopias round the corner. His hope and dreams flow from the past, a South Asian tradition of multiple selves living with their faiths, folk tales and mythologies that, together and separately offered sustenance to those who wished to drink what was basically the same water from multiple wells. For Intizar Husain the past, that is mirrored so often in his fiction is not simply nostalgia—yes it is that too—but a remembrance of and guide to life.
In Intizar Husain memory stands in opposition to History not just “as representation of facts” as Pierre Nora claimed but as something more profoundly unreliable. For Husain, the creation of Pakistan was not “historically inevitable” or “natural” . In fact, as Bhalla says of the writer in his Introduction to the collection of Partition stories he edited:
“Husain has said, repeatedly, that to assert that the Muslim identity in the Indian subcontinent has always been utterly distinct from Hinduism and has been formed in antagonistic relationship with it, making the formation of Pakistan a political necessity and a logical outcome of cultural differences is not only bad history, but bad metaphysics.”
Husain wasn’t striking a political or ideological pose. He was committed to a passionately held faith in the plurality of gods and “truths” that south Asia’s diversity offered and that “ethicality an religiosity were not the exclusive preserves of any single community or sect.” (Bhalla, Introduction)
Such a recognition of south Asian diversity was not the outcome of scholarship but of memory, of an existence in pre-Partition India that stayed with him even when he settled in Pakistan. That recognition and the treasure troves of myths and folk tales ith which memories were so intimately interwoven form the bedrock of his creative impulse, his Muse. Memory stays imperfect but it lingers in the stories held dear, in the myths and epics heard and recited and experienced. Yes, it is the past, but in Husain’s hands that past is not like Nora’s recorded history (the Partition is) but a guide to the Present. What he is telling us in stories such as The Chronicle of the Peacocks is that the past isn’t past, its isn’t dead and the hope remains of the writer penning his Morenama!
In Husain’s stories, indeed in all his work, myths and memories are reclaimed as one’s legacy not as objectified museum artifacts but as guides to a praxis of good living…which itself needs not much definitional clarity if one places trust on south Asian experiential history over a millennium or more. In stories such as The Boat, he brings into play creation myths of Man’s Fall and the Flood as punishment in a fascinating take of retribution. The City of Sorrow is a nightmare for the protagonists who have engaged in unbridled violence and rape. There seems no redemption but underlying the nightmares is a hope of a return (a journey) to a better world of simplicity and grace. Husain’s fictions are not detective stories with definitive clear endings. They engage in ambiguities and so the doors are open for other endings.
Physically uprooted from the tradition and life that had sustained him before Partition in a pluverse of multiple faiths/sects, Intizar Husain finds his roots again—in memory, whose potency as a counter to violence keeps remnants of an old tolerance and co-existence still alive and throbbing. In various stories and in his novel, Tazkira aan extract of which in translation New Home can be read here, threats of tree felling determines the eprotagonists desire to leave his new home and sek another. Uprooted in reality, rooted by memory to another lived reality of the neem tree, of old Ayodhya, that still throbs…
courtesy Getty images
A universal humanism inflects and guides Husain’s work. Not the secularized Post Enlightenment version that places Man at the center of all life, that shunts off religions and faaiths to the private domain, that exalts the scientific temper but a humanism that flows from those myths and memories that precede historical time and are gounded in creation myths, that valorize all life in non-hierarchical ways. Such a humanism borne out of tradition and a Past, root the author in a profoundly grace-driven cosmopolitanism of non-violence and love for all the pluversity of life. What more reason to read him?
The Beacon had requested Alok Bhalla to curate this edition of The Beacon as a tribute to the Rooted Cosmopolitan’ and he has obliged with a selection of his translations and his own essay on the author and Akhilesh the painter.
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References Italo Calvino. The Literary Machine Essays. Vintage 1997. P 128 Alok Bhalla. Introduction. [In] Stories About the Partition of India. HarperCollins India 1999 Pierre Nora. Between Memory and History.Les Lieux des Memoire (1989) Translated by Marc Roudebush
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The Rooted Cosmopolitan: Intizar Husain Curated by Alok Bhalla
-- When Stories, Colours and Ideas Cross Borders like Vagabonds: An Imagined Dialogue between Intizar Husain, and Akhilesh, the Painter
-- Chronicle of the Peacocks: Intizar Husain. Translated by Alok Bhalla
-- The City of Sorrow: Intizar Husain. Translated by Alok Bhalla
-- The Boat: Intizar Husain. Translated by Alok Bhalla
-- Leaves: Intizar Husain. Translated by Alok Bhalla
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